War and peace
"War is the continuation of politics by other means", wrote Clausewitz, as he confronted Napoleon with strategy, waiting for the arrival of the Russian winter to defeat him. As did Tolstoy from literature, though little convinced that liberal ideas were unhealthy for healing Russia's social and political sickness. Lenin borrowed, some time later, the Prussian military man's definition to debase it, and to subject the proletarians to the Soviet yoke after liberating them from the capitalist yoke. "Politics is the continuation of war by other means", said the visionary propagandist and imagined that, with God dead, there would be only one figure left, himself, to become the representative of the universal faith.
Only one person could stand up to the Leninist madness of becoming the universal leader of the earth and Russia: the Tsar. The last Caesar of Rome. The last emperor of Orthodox Christianity. The living symbol of the imperial past in Eurasia. And so, he shot him. Along with his family. So that there would be no heir left but him, Lenin, and whoever was capable of succeeding him. Who turned out to be a Georgian surnamed Stalin, also miserable, just like the communist ideologue.
Russia's history is as immense as its territory and as insignificant as the morals of some of its protagonists. Quite the opposite of the dead souls of Gogol's peasants, immense for universal literature and memory, although scattered over the insignificant territory in which servitude confined them. In this immensity of cultural and historical influences, any leader can lose his orientation and the meaning of politics. Which is none other than to preserve peace, prevent war and promote progress.
Putin has escalated the conflict in Ukraine into a war, expansive rather than defensive, through which he has strengthened his Western rivals and weakened his Ukrainian and Central European neighbours. Exactly the opposite of what it sought with its destabilisation policy, which was to show its Slavic neighbours and the rest of the world the weakness of liberal democracy and the strength of Russian autocracy.
Aware of having miscalculated the scale and impact of liberal ideas, as had happened to the tsars and communists, he has chosen, as his predecessors did, to use the force of his army to hide the extent of his mistake. With his attack on the heart of Ukraine, he has lost his reason. The root cause of any victory.